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Budget Plan Sets Jan. 27 Deadline for ACA Repeal Proposals

The budget resolution intended to pave the way for an eventual vote to partially repeal
the Affordable Care Act gives two key Senate committees until Jan. 27 to put their
proposals into legislative language.

Senate Budget Committee Chairman Mike Enzi (R-Wyo.)
unveiled the text of the budget resolution (S. Con. Res. 3) on Jan. 3, the first day
of the 115th Congress, and highlighted its importance as a way of ensuring the partial
repeal of the ACA, one of congressional Republicans’ top priorities this year.

Debate on the budget plan is expected to begin Jan. 4, according to David Popp, communications
director for Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.). Debate on budget resolutions
is generally limited to 50 hours on the floor, though post-debate offering of amendments
adds extra time to that limit.

‘First Steps.’

“Insurers are withdrawing from markets across the country, leaving many families with
fewer choices and less access to care than they had before—the opposite of what the
law promised,”
Enzi said in a statement. “Today, we take the first steps to repair the nation’s broken
health care system, removing Washington from the equation and putting control back
where it belongs: with patients, their families, and their doctors.”

Adopting a budget resolution in common between the House and Senate is the first major
move by Republicans toward scrapping President Barack Obama’s signature health-care
law. Under a process known as reconciliation, later legislation can be spun out from
the budget resolution that will be immune to the Senate’s filibuster, thus allowing
passage in the Senate with only 51 votes. Republicans hold 52 seats in the chamber.

In the new budget resolution, two Senate committees—the tax-writing Finance Committee
and the Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions Committee, were given reconciliation
instructions. Both panels were instructed to come up with legislation to reduce the
10-year federal deficit by $1 billion each by Jan. 27. The resulting legislative language
will be melded together by the Budget Committee and sent to Senate floor afterward.

While avoiding a filibuster in the House is not an issue, the resolution also provided
similar reconciliation instructions to the House Ways and Means and the Energy and
Commerce committees, also with a Jan. 27 target date.

Deadline Not Binding

A similar approach worked in 2016, when Obama vetoed a reconciliation bill (H.R. 3762)
using the same process. But with Donald Trump taking office Jan. 20, Republicans see
the reconciliation process as the easiest way to repeal major parts of the ACA and
give Trump an early political victory.

That Jan. 27 deadline could fall by the wayside, though, unless Republicans manage
to narrow differences over how long any transition period from repeal to a new health-care
approach takes. While the budget resolution sets the deadline for committees to report,
reconciliation bills in the past have sometimes been late yet still received protection
from filibusters.

Another hurdle will be the potential cost of an ACA replacement. In the House, a package
of new rules to govern the House floor in the 115th Congress exempted legislation
to repeal or replace the act from a new prohibition on bills that would cause mandatory
spending—the category that includes Social Security and Medicare—to grow by more than
$5 billion in later decades outside the budget window.

The Senate budget resolution includes similar language, which would exempt ACA-related
legislation from existing Senate parliamentary points of order against increasing
short- or long-term deficits.

“The inclusion of these exemptions suggests an expectation that the costs of replacement
legislation may exceed the savings from repeal by more than $10 billion in some of
the years within the 10-year budget window, and that the combination of repeal and
replace legislation may increase the long-term deficit beyond the ten-year budget
window,” the bipartisan Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget said in a blog
posting on its website.

Trillion-Dollar Deficit Included

The tables in the budget resolution itself appear to reflect a budget approach close
to what is expected to happen under law. The deficit for fiscal 2017, which began
Oct. 1, 2016, is projected to be $582.6 billion. In August, the nonpartisan Congressional
Budget Office said the 2017 deficit would be $594 billion. By comparison, under the
assumptions of the fiscal 2016 budget adopted in May 2015, the 2017 deficit was projected
to be only $206.1 billion.

Similarly, the deficit in the final year of the budget, 2026, is projected to be $1.009
trillion, in contrast to the $295.8 billion surplus projected for 2025 in the previous
budget.

Republicans have touted the budget plan as a way to scrap the health-care law rather
than as a vehicle for fiscal policy that is its usual purpose.

In the resolution, the public debt would rise to $29.126 trillion in 2026, up from
$19.977 trillion it stood at as of Dec. 31, 2016, but close to the $28.207 trillion
the CBO forecasted in August.

To contact the reporter on this story: Jonathan Nicholson in Washington at
jnicholson@bna.com

To contact the editor responsible for this story:
Paul Hendrie at
phendrie@bna.com

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